The national interest: politics after globalisation
Are the politics of national interest making a comeback in the multipolar world after the end of globalisation? What is the national interest and why did it get forgotten at the end of the 20th century? Does the idea offer a way out of the impasse afflicting politics in the 21st century?
Since the USA under Donald Trump turned to pursuing an openly ‘America First’ agenda in trade and foreign policy, and his Secretary of State recognised that we are now living in a multipolar world, everyone else has been forced to start thinking about their own country’s national interest. This is however an unfamiliar way of thinking about politics. During the previous 30 years of globalisation, the idea of the national interest fell into disuse. Politics was organised around global questions of trade and financial markets, human rights and climate change, democratisation and the War on Terror. National identities were displaced by cultural, religious or personal identities, national interests by international agreements and global governance regimes.
Our panel of three experts will discuss whether there really is such a thing as the national interest, whether it really is back, who decides what it is, and what effects thinking in terms of national interest may have on politics both within individual states and between them.
Meet our speakers and chair
Philip Cunliffe (@thephilippics) is Associate Professor in International Relations at University College London. He is the author of The National Interest: Politics After Globalization (2025). His other books include Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit (2023); The End of the End of History: Politics in the Twenty-First Century (2021); The New Twenty Years' Crisis: A Critique of International Relations, 1999-2019 (2020); Cosmopolitan Dystopia: International Intervention and the Failure of the West (2020). He writes regularly for Unherd, and co-founded the podcast Bungacast.
Anand Menon (@anandMenon1) is Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London. He is the Director of UK In A Changing Europe, the think tank communicating social scientific research on Brexit and the Brexit process to non-academic audiences. He is an associate fellow of Chatham House and Senior Associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford. His books include Brexit and British Politics (2017); The European Union: Integration and Enlargement (2016); and European Politics (2007).
Helen Thompson (@HelenHet20) is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University. She is an influential commentator on British and international politics, writes regularly for the New Statesman and was co-presenter of the podcasts Talking Politics and These Times. Her books include Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (2022); Oil and the Western Economic Crisis (2017); and China and the Mortgaging of America (2010).
Peter Ramsay (@peteray21) is Professor of Law at LSE. He is currently working on a political jurisprudence of English criminal law that explains how the public interest and the political authority of the nation-state lie at the heart of the criminal justice system.
More about this event
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